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The Quest Of Finding Linux Compatible Hardware

01-18-2011, 02:10 PM

Phoronix: The Quest Of Finding Linux Compatible Hardware

While Intel is often looked at as being the most Linux and open-source friendly company among the major IHVs, as shown today in Intel's Linux Sandy Bridge Graphics Still Troubling, even in 2011 there are still serious Linux hardware issues to overcome. The Linux hardware support has a much better foundation than where it was at in 2004 when I founded Phoronix, and for hardware that's been in the marketplace for a few months old these problems quickly go away, but for new adopters it's the biggest challenge...

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Thats a great use of the data generated from the PTS. Could help a lot of people determining what wifi chips are actually best supported. But how do you benchmark something like soundcards? People want to know if spdif out is working with some random application for example.

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Thats a great use of the data generated from the PTS. Could help a lot of people determining what wifi chips are actually best supported. But how do you benchmark something like soundcards? People want to know if spdif out is working with some random application for example.

I haven't looked much into sound card support yet, but one rough estimate for that could be to look at the percent of people using a given sound card relative to other audio adapters, at least as a cursory way to see if something looks to be possibly supported well or not. And then use the commenting system to ask the active owners.

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Hey seen that article I had the following idea:
You can display the performance of different combinations of hardware using PTS. You should also benchmark hardware comparing Windows and Linux performance.
With this, users may have an idea of what hardware they will be buying.
Meanwhile you could threat bad hardware vendors like SiS and Via, sending them the following message: "Hey VIA/SiS look at these benchmarks, see how NVIDIA, Intel and AMD give good results in our tests. Have you realized that your hardware aren' t there? Can you guess why?"
This should make them fell very envy about not seeing their hardware in the recommended list.
You could also create a list of the hardware that should be avoided.
Printers, scanners and every other hardware should be also available.

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Does Optimus work under Linux? I thought Nvidia made it clear that they would not support it.

<---- EXACTLY. Be careful people, on most optimus laptops having the nvidia chip is basically the same as having a rock weighting the same.

Michael: In price comparisons, please also consider non-US users. Most benchmark sites *cough*anandtech*cough*tom's hardware*cough* tend to forget we exist. We don't use dollars, don't have access to newegg, and don't have rebates. So a very valid price comparison or guide in the US is normally not applicable in Europe or other places in the world.

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<---- EXACTLY. Be careful people, on most optimus laptops having the nvidia chip is basically the same as having a rock weighting the same.

Michael: In price comparisons, please also consider non-US users. Most benchmark sites *cough*anandtech*cough*tom's hardware*cough* tend to forget we exist. We don't use dollars, don't have access to newegg, and don't have rebates. So a very valid price comparison or guide in the US is normally not applicable in Europe or other places in the world.

Well, isn't it better it works for some of us rather than none of us at all?